Emotional grounds: stories of football, memories, and emotions

Central to the emotional experience of watching sport is memory – the capacity to recall great achievements, triumphs and defeats. For most sports fans, these memories are collective. However, this essay seeks to shed light on the ways in which sporting spaces – in this case football grounds – are also sites of acts of intimate emotional remembering that can exert a powerful hold over individuals even after (or, in some instances, because) many years have elapsed and a certain distance travelled. The essay briefly discusses the sociological significance of emotion, memory and place before adopting a narrative approach to describe and interrogate the author's own memories of particular moments in time and in sporting space. The stories that are told represent an invocation of emotions that are now indelibly associated with specific football grounds at particular times and also, in some cases, with the people with whom the author experienced these places. The essay seeks to demonstrate that the emotions that can be prompted by memories of football grounds often exceed the immediate excitement created by the event and, at least as importantly, necessarily vary from one spectator to another.